Sometimes I think that having less choice is better than having more choice. It may depend on a person, but it can drive me crazy when I have too vast selection, and I have the need to make a choice. That’s true for all kinds of mechandise that I buy. That’s why I always look for the reviews, recommendations, and for a forgiving return policy.

I wanted a wiki for my site, as I find wiki a wonderful tool for collaborative development of ideas. I needed to make a choice, so I googled for wiki comparision tables, and reviews. I found several of them, and at first I chose MediaWiki as the most well known wiki out there. Well, after I have downloaded it and have taken a quick look around, it ticked me that it was way too big than what I imagined it would be. After careful investigation of the same comparison tables I put my finger on WikkaWiki that, compared to lots of other lightweight wiki tools is still being developed.

Installation was a breeze, quick and easy. I put a full copy of the distribution in a separate directory, and linked to it from where I wanted my wiki to be. I wanted several of them in different places and separate, and that way I was able to make that happen with ease. Everything happens on a single installation page, and after you have filled it with all necessary data, it creates the database tables for you, and initializes your wiki. The configuration file is put in the local directory, and you are free to modify it if needed.

Nothing is perfect, as you can imagine. For my installation, I wanted the wiki to be private, and for that I needed it to not allow freely available registration. There was no option to do that, so I had to hack the code, remove the registration part, and move it to a special administration page inside the wiki where I could create new users myself. Also, the defaults are set in the configuration file to allow public access to the wiki pages, and I changed it to allow registered users only. The most interesting (and somewhat disturbing) thing was that WikkaWiki creates a cookie when the user logs in, and that cookie is not linked to specific wiki, but rather to the host. That is, when you have several wiki on your site, once you log in to one of them, you get logged in to all other wiki automatically! I will see if I can fix that as that’s not quite what I want.

I’ve chosen WordPress as my blog engine for a number of reasons. One of the main reasons to try it was the promise of one-minute install procedure. And in fact I did install it just under a minute, to my surprise! Having done that, I set up to find a suitable theme that I would have liked, and did not really find one. But hey, it’s just me! One thing I did not want to have for sure was using one of those common themes that are replicated on hundreds, if not thousands of WordPress powered sites, even though I am not a web designer at all.

Here are some of the annoyances that I encountered while setting up the blog using WordPress:

• It was very unclear how to set up your theme elsewhere other than in WordPress internal themes directory. Blog was not the only thing I was going to have on the site, and I did not want my content to go somewhere deep inside the WordPress installation. After lots of experimenting, and reading of the WordPress code I found a solution. I set up a theme directory in my website root, and had the necessary constants set to point to that directory. Here is the contents of my /index.php:

  <?php
          if (!defined('WP_USE_THEMES')) {
                  define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
          }
          if (!defined('TEMPLATEPATH')) {
                  define('TEMPLATEPATH', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/MyThemeDirectory');
          }
          require('./wp/wp-blog-header.php');
  ?>
  

• Wordpress support is a form of community support done by volunteers in the WordPress support forums. Developers seem to be rarely set to investigatate the problems, and that leaves experienced users no real option other than fix the problem themselves. I had this nasty problem with comments RSS feeds that I was fighting for over two weeks, and nobody could help me out there. I finaly figured out what’s happening, and put a fix in place in my copy of the code. I also submitted the bug report. The way it looks now it’s probably going to be fixed for the WordPress 1.6 release.
• For some things extra I put together a WordPress plugin for my installation that has a set of the functions I want. It is interesting, that a third of those functions are reimplementations of the WordPress’ standard functions that produce links, but do not provide the title attributes for the links, and have no way of passing those to them. I like having it all consistent and with the title for each link I have. I’ve also rewritten the calendar to not include any future posts, give me a slightly different interface, and (again!) provide the titles to the links. I tried to use some advanced features, such as replace the names of the templates that WordPress is looking for, and add some of my own using the template_redirect action, but failed miserably. Using the include()/require()/require_once() statement did not work and produced errors in completely distant places of the code. Partial success was when I used load_template() function, but in the end of the day that did not work either, giving me a set of similar problems for some of the templates I tried to include for specific actions. I finally gave up, after I discovered that it’s a long-standing problem. Needless to say that the support forum people were unable to help me with the problem (sigh).

As I studied the code a lot, I have an opinion on it. It’s a mixed opinion. The main thing is that the code just works for all standard applications and settings. That’s why people use it in the first place. Customizing it to suit your specific needs might be difficult, however, depending on what you want to accomplish. Some nontrivial bugs can drive you crazy, and I did not find much support in that area. I might not have looked in the right places for it though. The overall feel of the code that I’ve got was that it is structured well, yet it’s somewhat mushy, not clean and lean, and not very consistent. Also, it came as a shock to me when I turned on full warnings, and the system spit out a hundred of warning about undefined variables each time a blog page loaded in the browser. Hopefully the code gets improved as it matures.

The overall design and the structure of this site will most definitely change over time as I add, change, or remove things here and there. After all, it’s my first real take at a web site, it’s not a thing I am used to do for breakfast. It took me some learning the hard way.

I never had a blog, and frankly I never thought I would ever have one. Still I am not sure yet that I will have the time and desire to keep up with writing on a periodical basis, and make it into a habit. Anyhow, this is the first real post.

One of the reasons for starting a blog was that I had several ideas that I wanted to see developed into something real, and so I thought of having a personal website with a blog, wiki, and whatnot for sharing the ideas with trusted friends. I was thinking of a blog as a way of sharing my thoughts, musings, and ideas with those who knows me, and might be interested in joining me in further development of the ideas. The other thing was that I don’t see some of my friends as often now as I would like to, and a blog might be a way for us to still have that exchange of ideas that we used to do in the kitchen having a bottle or two of cheapest vermouth with nothing to eat.

We’ll see how it goes.